Everyday Literacies

Birmingham Small Arms

The tale of the Birmingham Small Arms company is an interesting one, indeed, and throws a certain light on the perennial fascination that so many hard core bikers--especially those of the gang affinity group affiliation type--have with small (and not so small) arms.

For me, the interest has ever only been in the bikes. In the fun years between my Masters and PhD struggles I acquired 2 BSAs. One was a 150cc Bantam. The other, purchased as partially restored parts, was a BSA pre-unit construction 500cc plunger framed model dating to 1950. I reckoned that for someone who had never ridden a motorcycle, let alone rebuilt one, the BSA would be a worthy challenge. And it was.

All kinds of interesting networks came into play. Like a flatmate's fascination with a young woman across the road--affectionately referred to by Johnnie-the-Obsessed as "The Goddess"--led to Kenny, the Goddess' younger brother. Kenny had old Brit thumpers from early adolescence, and backed them ahead of study. So by the time I had acquired the BSA parts, Kenny had already been dishonorably discharged from school and would be very happy indeed to spend some days hanging out putting the bike together once I had sandblasted and spray painted various remaining parts, had the chome bits re-plated, and imported all the authentic "cycle thread" nuts and bolts I could lay my hands on via snail mail from Lewis and sons, in Weybridge, England. Boxes of beautifully plated cycle thread in different sizes would arrive in Christchurch, New Zealand from the other side of the world, paid for by my hard-earned tutoring money from Canterbury University.

The bike duly came together, and then Kenny taught me (more or less) to ride the thing. Then it had to get its "warrant of fitness" certificate. I got my licence in the morning, took my first lengthy ride -- 5 miles or so -- in the afternoon, and by evening the bike was street legal.

It became my main mode of transport in Auckland, when I went there to work at Auckland University. Too many tales to tell here, but maybe one day. My worst accident landed me in hospital for 12 months worth of stays over a couple of years, while some very skilled surgeons rebuilt a leg. By that time I had my doctorate, and lying in bed for months on end provided a perfect opportunity to turn the sucker into a book. It must have sold a copy or two in Britain, because Ivor Goodson read it and informed me of this when he visited Auckland University. Over a pint (it may have been more) of beer at the bar down the road from my office Ivor said he'd read the book (called "Freedom and Education" in the days before that struck me as oxymorinic) and he reckoned there was a paragraph in it that he rather liked. He asked what I was writing about these days, and I told him that post thesis I had got interested in Paulo Freire's concept of freedom as liberation. I was now writing about literacy and revolution.

Ivor reckoned you always needed three things in a title. So he asked "why don't you add "schooling" and write a book on "Literacy, Schooling and Revolution"? I said I had these motorbikes (a 1973 Triumph had been added to the stable by that time) and lots of mates and some spare time, and a reasonably fun life, so I didn't think that writing something that would prolly end up in some acquisition editor's trash can was a very good idea. I was happy enough writing the odd paper (and most of them *were* pretty odd). Ivor said "Oh, we'd give you a contract" and for some reason that must have made a difference.

The rest is the treadmill I am just now hopping off.

So, this week is a holiday, and I am down here in a lovely part of the world just out of Toowoomba, Australia, and this just happens to be where the old single banger hangs out these days. It's not street legal, although I am working on that. I do, however, have a helmet, and in a quiet part of the world that is relatively lightly policed the odds are pretty good of being able to do some road testing without getting done.

So, that is some of what I've been doing. So here's the ole pal in question.

Farewell to GeoCities

Back in the mid 90s GeoCities provided a truly welcome free website hosting service for people like ourselves who wanted a basic web presence without having to get involved in complicated a, and often costly, web hosting arrangements. For almost 15 years we maintained our website (at www.coatepec.net) courtesy of GeoCities' beneficence-- which, to be sure, was heavily underwritten by outfits like Yahoo.com. In our own case we have purchased, and continue to purchase, services from Yahoo as a form of consumer loyalty to a web pioneer we wish well for. And GeoCities sites can continue to live on via Yahoo services which, in many cases will remain free for some time.

Like millions of other people around the world we feel today's "passing" of GeoCities as exactly that. It's been a great friend over a lengthy and decisive period of internet evolution. We have always been glad to have had the chance to be part of it.

Books available for reviewing

We have a brand new batch of books in from publishers. If you'd like to review one--or more--of these books for the journal, e-Learning, email Michele (knobelm@mail.montclair.edu) and specify which book(s) and your mailing address, and she'll get back to you with review guidelines and a copy of the book(s).

Bermejo, F. (2007). The internet audience: Constitution and MeasurementNew York: Peter Lang.

Bonk, C. J. (2009). The world is open: How web technology is revolutionizing education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Gordon, D. (Ed.). (2003). Better teaching and learning in the digital classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Herrington, A., Hodgson, K., & Moran, C. (Eds.). (2009). Teaching the new writing: Technology, change, and assessment in the 21st-century classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.

Jankowski, N. (ed) (2009). E-Research: Transformation in Scholarly Practice. New York: Routledge.

Lehmann, K., and Chamberlin, L. (2009). Making the move to eLearning: Putting your course online. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education.

O’Dowd, R. (Ed.). (2007). Online intercultural exchange: An introduction for foreign language teachers. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Slotta, J. D., and Linn, M. C. (2009). WISE
science: Web-based inquiry in the classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.

Taffe, S. W., & Gwinn, C. B. (2007). Integrating literacy and technology: Effective practices for grades K-6. New York: Guilford Press.

Turow, J., and Tsui, L. (Eds.). (2008). The hyperlinked society: Questioning connections in the digital age. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Talk of next-generation messaging

Recent buzz on the internet is Google's Wave project, which promises to change the way we communicate with others using text as the primary (but not the sole) medium. As Ryan Paul of ars technica explains:

It brings together elements of instant messaging, e-mail, collaborative rich document editing, and generic support for third-party Web services in a single seamless communication medium that is more flexible than any of those things individually.

This sounds all well and good, but it was this video that helped it all make sense for me.



If Google delivers on even half of this, email as we currently know it (a 30-year old technology, by the way), will look obsolete overnight.

Make your own point-and-click games!

Not a computer programmer, but really keen to muck around and make your own games online? The Fableforge.org is for you! We haven't had a chance to tinker with it yet, but it looks absolutely fabulous. Basically, it's a game engine accessed online that you can use to create your own point-and-click games (i.e., your mouse cursor is the control device, and you can use it to navigate through or around settings, to select game options (e.g., "ring bell", "talk to ghost"), and to access additional information about the game narrative to help you solve or complete the game itself. The truly excellent thing is that it looks like the FableForge engine helps you to create really polished-looking games with just a modicum of knowledge about how such games are developed. That's our kind of produser service!

The website itself is designed to be both a space where you can create your games, play other people's games and comment upon/review and discuss these games.

The introductory video tutorial is a gem--the creator of Fableforge is a delightful commentator, and the tutorial is really comprehensive. Marco is also in the process of developing additional vdieo tutorials, available through his YouTube account.

The 9/12 rally, Chomsky, and "sociological imagination"

In terms that really matter, Washington is not so far from Cairns -- or from anywhere else, for that matter. Hence, the "9/12 rally" is of much more than passing interest, as is the commentary on reddit.

The comment that introduced Noam Chomsky's "take" on "the 'populist rage' going around the country and what it could lead to in light of the rising unemployment" grabbed my attention within the context of the surrounding comments. The commenter excerpted from the following sequence:

"AMY GOODMAN: The whole issue of populist rage, Noam Chomsky, actually, do you think that this rage is going to boil over as the unemployment figures rise?

NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s very hard to predict those things. I mean, it has a potentially positive side, like it could be like the activism of the 1930s or the 1960s, which ended up making it a more civilized society in many ways, or it could be like an unfortunate precedent that quickly comes to mind. I’ve written about it.

Take a look at Germany. In the 1920s, Germany was the absolute peak of Western civilization, in the arts and the sciences. It was regarded as a model of democracy and so on. I mean, ten years later, it was the depths of barbarism. That was a quick transition. "The descent into barbarism" it's sometimes called in the scholarly literature.

Now, if you listen to early Nazi propaganda, you know, end of the Weimar Republic and so on, and you listen to talk radio in the United States, which I often do--it’s interesting--there’s a resemblance. And in both cases, you have a lot of demagogues appealing to people with real grievances.

Grievances aren’t invented. I mean, for the American population, the last thirty years have been some of the worst in economic history. It’s a rich country, but real wages have stagnated or declined, working hours have shot up, benefits have gone down, and people are in real trouble and now in very real trouble after the bubbles burst. And they’re angry. And they want to know, "What happened to me? You know, I’m a hard-working, white, God-fearing American. You know, how come this is happening to me?"

That’s pretty much the Nazi appeal. The grievances were real. And one of the possibilities is what Rush Limbaugh tells you: "Well, it’s happening to you because of those bad guys out there." OK, in the Nazi case, it was the Jews and the Bolsheviks. Here, it’s the rich Democrats who run Wall Street and run the media and give everything away to illegal immigrants, and so on and so forth. It sort of peaked during the Sarah Palin period. And it’s kind of interesting. It’s been pointed out that of all the candidates, Sarah Palin is the only one who used the phrase "working class." She was talking to the working people. And yeah, they’re the ones who are suffering. So, there are models that are not very attractive."

This immediately got me thinking about C. Wright Mills' argument about "sociological imagination" (and, interestingly, Chomsky refers to Mills in the interview, but on a different point).

It has long been my belief that being able to "grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society" must be the first fruits of an acceptable education. To compel young people to undergo education whilst systematically withholding opportunities for developing, nurturing, and sustaining sociological imagination constitutes, in my view, the state's official crime against young people -- which, of course, includes us all, sooner or later.

Of course, we may want nowadays to revamp Mills' concept a bit to take account of "multiple subjectivities" and the like -- to give identity more of poststructuralist "spin" than "biography" might intimate at first blush. But, to my mind, the substantive point remains true, and as important today as ever: An education that does not have the pursuit of socilogical imagination at its core is at best a "schooling", it is NOT an education.

One of the things that has most "angsted" me throughout the times I have spent in universities is the extent to which prevalent conceptions of what it means to "make serious academic, theoretically, and research advances" systematically sideline a focus on sociological imagination (or whatever we might want to call it). This includes many developments within kindred academic pursuits, such as building more sophisticated -- even "critical" -- forms of discourse analysis. Too often, in my view, the focus on generating "improved" and more subtle and sophisticated analytic procedures, techniques, and "theoretical housings" can end up detracting attention from the relatively straightforward point that caring about understanding the relationships between biography and history, and knowing what to do with that understanding, and how to do it in principled ways, is at the heart of the end game.

YouTube vidoes for imode

Erm, while working diligently on updating my ipod classic- I mean, updating my syllabi, I stumbled across this very cool hack for downloading YouTube videos as mp4 files that will transfer directly to iPods, Zunes without any pesky video file converting needed.

Basically, you install a web browser toolbar button that you simply click once you have the YouTube video showing on your screen, and down it comes as an mp4. My kinda application!

Read more about it--and find the button to add--here:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/04/download-youtube-videos-as-mp4-files.html

If only I'd known about it a few months ago when I was on my Monty Python downloading blitz!

Cool image search engine

So, while working diligently on my syllabi (koff! koff!) for the upcoming new semester I just happened to stumble upon this very useful image search engine (and subsequently lost quite a few hours to playing with it--sooo much more interesting than updating bibliographies!).

It's called Tin Eye and, according to their "About me" blurb:

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.

They have some interesting search results listed here.

For me, this is an easy way to track memes, or to find out where a particular image originated (to check on photoshopped details etc.).